<div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zXpq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e09d98b-75f8-49b2-ac24-7c194b38e7e2_1280x720.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zXpq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e09d98b-75f8-49b2-ac24-7c194b38e7e2_1280x720.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zXpq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e09d98b-75f8-49b2-ac24-7c194b38e7e2_1280x720.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zXpq!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e09d98b-75f8-49b2-ac24-7c194b38e7e2_1280x720.png" width="1280" height="720" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zXpq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e09d98b-75f8-49b2-ac24-7c194b38e7e2_1280x720.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zXpq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e09d98b-75f8-49b2-ac24-7c194b38e7e2_1280x720.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zXpq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e09d98b-75f8-49b2-ac24-7c194b38e7e2_1280x720.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zXpq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e09d98b-75f8-49b2-ac24-7c194b38e7e2_1280x720.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zXpq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e09d98b-75f8-49b2-ac24-7c194b38e7e2_1280x720.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!zXpq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e09d98b-75f8-49b2-ac24-7c194b38e7e2_1280x720.png"></a></figure></div><p>The smallest act of remembrance on the Sufi path asks for almost nothing. No posture, no ablution, no direction faced, no phrase a person would have to be taught. It asks for one breath. Let the breath out slowly, through a mouth held a little open, and listen to the sound it makes on its own, without the will shaping it. A soft sound gathers at the back of the throat and rounds as the air leaves. Sustained even for a moment, it is already a word, and the word is the most exalted in the lexicon of the path.</p><p><em>Hu.</em></p><p>He. The bare pronoun. Of all the Names of God it is the plainest to say and the hardest to fathom, because it is the one Name that describes nothing at all. The others each carry a meaning the heart can take hold of. <em>Ar-Rahman</em> names the boundless mercy. <em>Al-Hayy</em> names the living. <em>Al-Alim</em> names the One who knows. Every one of these tells you something true about God by lending Him a quality you have already met, in some lesser measure, somewhere in the world. <em>Hu</em> lends Him nothing. It points past every quality to the One who possesses them, to the sheer fact of His being He, and it points in such a way that the One indicated is never brought into view. It is at once the most intimate word a tongue can carry toward God and the most withdrawn, for the One it indicates can never be turned around to face the speaker. To grasp why the masters of this path gave the whole of their attention to so small a syllable is to travel the length of their metaphysics, from the grammar of a single pronoun to the breathing of the cosmos. What follows walks that length.</p><div><hr></div><div><div><p>Thanks for reading Spiritualrelief's Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it.</p></div><p><a href="https://spiritualrelief.substack.com/p/hu-the-name-of-the-hidden?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share"><span>Share</span></a></p></div><h2>The grammar of the Hidden</h2><p>Begin where the Sufis began, with grammar, which they never treated as a low science. <em>Hu</em> is the Arabic <em>huwa</em>, the third-person pronoun, He, worn down on the breath to a single syllable. A language has three persons, and the Sufis read them as three degrees of nearness. The first person, <em>ana</em>, I, is the speaker asserting himself, the self that stands on its own ground. The second person, <em>anta</em>, You, is the one addressed, the face turned toward you, present, within reach of speech. The third person, <em>huwa</em>, He, is the one spoken of and not spoken to, the absent one, outside the circle of address.</p><p>To name God <em>Hu</em> is to point deliberately at that absence. It is to say that the Real is never the object across from you, never the <em>this</em> you could set down and examine, never even the You your prayer turns to face. He is the One who is always further in than any turning can reach. The pronoun indicates its object and in the same motion keeps it hidden. Ibn Arabi, who gave the Sufi vocabulary much of its precision, defined the word in his lexicon of technical terms with a phrase that says almost nothing and means everything.</p><h3>Ibn Arabi</h3><blockquote><p>Hu is the Unseen, the One it is not fitting to witness.</p></blockquote><p><em>Istilahat al-Sufiyya</em></p><p>The word he uses for the Unseen is <em>al-ghayb</em>, the realm hidden by its very nature, the absent, the unwitnessable. And the abstraction he builds from the pronoun is <em>huwiyya</em>, His He-ness, His ipseity, the bare selfhood of God prior to anything that could be said of Him. <em>Hu</em> is the Name of that He-ness. It is the Name that fails, on purpose, as a description, because the thing it points to cannot be described and stay itself.</p><p>The Quran had already made this move. The chapter of pure oneness, <em>al-Ikhlas</em>, which the tradition holds equal to a third of the whole book, does not open with the word God. It opens with the pronoun.</p><blockquote><p>Say: He is God, the One.</p></blockquote><p><em>Qur’an 112:1</em></p><p><em>Qul Huwa Allahu ahad.</em> He, first; then God; then One. The pronoun stands before the Name, as if to say that what is named here lies behind the naming itself. And elsewhere the same pronoun is made to hold opposites that no created thing can hold together.</p><blockquote><p>He is the First and the Last, the Outward and the Inward.</p></blockquote><p><em>Qur’an 57:3</em></p><p><em>Huwa al-awwal wal-akhir waz-zahir wal-batin.</em> Before and after, manifest and hidden, all of it gathered into the single He. The pronoun is wide enough to carry contradictions because it carries no content of its own to be contradicted. It is the empty vessel exactly fitted to the One who exceeds every form.</p><div><hr></div><h2>The Name of the Essence</h2><p>Sufi metaphysics divides the Names of God along a seam. On one side stand the Names of the attributes, the descriptions, the ninety-nine and more by which God makes Himself legible to His creation: the Merciful, the Forgiving, the Generous, the Avenger. Each of these is a relation, a face God turns toward the world, a way the hidden becomes readable to those who are not hidden. On the other side of the seam stands a single Name that describes nothing and turns no face. The Sufis called it <em>ism al-dhat</em>, the Name of the Essence, the Name that reaches past every attribute to the One who holds them. <em>Allah</em> is one form of it. <em>Hu</em> is the other, and the more naked.</p><p>The difference is the whole point. To call on the Merciful is to approach God by way of His mercy, to come to Him through something He does. To call <em>Hu</em> is to approach Him through nothing He does, to set aside every attribute and indicate only that He is. It is the Name the heart reaches for when it wishes to leave behind even the gifts and the descriptions and stand before the bare fact of the Giver. Abd al-Karim al-Jili, who wrote the most thorough Sufi anatomy of the divine selfhood, reduced the matter to a line.</p><h3>Abd al-Karim al-Jili</h3><blockquote><p>The He-ness is the hiddenness of the Essence, the Essence that is one alone.</p></blockquote><p><em>al-Insan al-Kamil</em></p><p>The He-ness, <em>al-huwiyya</em>, is the Essence considered in its hiddenness, as it is in and for itself before it discloses anything outward. The tradition mapped this as a depth. Below the world of men, <em>nasut</em>, and below the world of the divine attributes, <em>lahut</em>, the metaphysicians placed an innermost sphere they named from the pronoun itself, <em>hahut</em>, the sphere of <em>Hu</em>, the He-ness regarding only its own hiddenness, with no door cut into it and no face turned out of it. Every other Name opens onto some relation. <em>Hu</em> opens onto the closed. It is the Name of the one region of reality that admits no witness, and it reaches that region precisely because it consents to name without revealing.</p><p>This is why, in the gatherings of the orders, <em>Hu</em> came to carry as much weight as <em>Allah</em>, and to some of the masters more. The fuller Name still bears the trace of its letters, its meaning, its grammar. The pronoun has been stripped almost to nothing, and what is almost nothing is the only thing small enough to pass through a door that is not there.</p><div><hr></div><h2>The Name dismantled to a breath</h2><p>The Sufis found that the Greatest Name carries its own undoing inside it, and that the undoing leads straight to <em>Hu</em>. <em>Allah</em> is written with four letters: <em>alif</em>, <em>lam</em>, <em>lam</em>, <em>ha</em>. Strip away the first letter, the <em>alif</em>, and what remains, <em>lillah</em>, still means for God. Strip away the next and what remains, <em>lahu</em>, still means to Him. Strip away the next and what remains is <em>Hu</em>, He. Four letters worn down to one syllable, and at every stage of the wearing the word has lost a letter without losing God. The Name does not break under the reduction. It concentrates. Each amputation carries the sense a degree deeper, from the Named with all His attributes, through the <em>for</em> and the <em>to</em> that still imply a relation, down to the unqualified pronoun of the Hidden, the bare Ipseity with every describable thing taken away.</p><p>And the syllable does not stop at <em>Hu</em>. Its final letter is the <em>ha</em>, the soft breathing that is scarcely a consonant, little more than an outbreath given a shape. That same letter is the last letter of <em>Allah</em>. The Greatest Name ends on the breath, and the most hidden Name begins on it, so that where the Name runs out the breath takes over, and the breath, left to itself, is already saying <em>Hu</em>. The descent that began with four letters ends with no letter at all, only air leaving the body.</p><p>In the gathered remembrance the orders walk this descent with the whole body. The Name is repeated aloud, and as the circle deepens and quickens the syllables wear down in the mouth the way the letters wore down on the page, <em>Allah</em> loosening toward <em>Hu</em>, <em>Hu</em> loosening toward the <em>ha</em>, the <em>ha</em> loosening toward the bare breath, until a room full of people is no longer pronouncing a word but sounding a single sustained exhalation in the dark, and the one who began by remembering God has been carried to the place where remembering and breathing are one act. The dismantling of the Name is a map of descent, and the dervishes walk it with their lungs.</p><div><hr></div><h2>The Breath of the Merciful</h2><p>Why should the deepest Name of God be a breath, and why should the whole of creation answer to an exhalation? The Sufis built their reply on a saying they treasured, a tradition in which God gives His own reason for making anything at all.</p><h3>hadith qudsi</h3><blockquote><p>I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, so I created the creation that I might be known.</p></blockquote><p>The hidden, by its nature, is unseen. A treasure walled in the dark is as good as nothing to any eye. The love to be known is therefore a pressure toward disclosure, a movement from the closed toward the open, and Ibn Arabi gave that movement its name. He called it <em>nafas al-Rahman</em>, the Breath of the All-Merciful. As a held breath presses to be released, the Names of God, latent and crowded in the hidden Essence, press to be known, and the merciful exhalation carries them out of concealment into the forms where they can at last appear.</p><h3>Ibn Arabi</h3><blockquote><p>The names of God, longing to be known, are carried out upon the Breath of the All-Merciful into the forms in which they appear, as letters are carried out of the chest upon the breath of one who speaks.</p></blockquote><p><em>on the nafas al-Rahman</em></p><p>Read what this makes of the world. Every existing thing is a word the divine breath has pronounced. A tree, a name, a grief, a galaxy, each is a sound shaped by the one exhalation, held in the air for the span of its existence, sustained only while the breath continues. The cosmos is the speech of God, and like all speech it is event before it is object, happening before it is thing. Ibn Arabi pressed this to its edge. He taught that the speaking never pauses, that creation is renewed at every instant, <em>khalq jadid</em>, the world flickering out and back faster than any eye can follow, so that nothing is ever truly repeated because the word is always being freshly said. And he gave the relation between the speech and the Speaker its sharpest form. The cosmos is <em>huwa la huwa</em>, He and not He. It is He, because it is nothing other than His self-disclosure, the Names made audible. It is not He, because the One who breathes remains hidden in the Hidden even as the breath goes out, the treasure never emptied by its spending.</p><p>Now the small syllable on your own outbreath stands in a different light. When you let a breath go and it shapes itself, without your asking, into <em>Hu</em>, you are not performing a private devotion in a corner of a large and indifferent universe. You are doing in little, with one body, what the whole of existence is doing at large. The hidden is becoming heard. A breath is carrying a name out of the dark. Your exhalation is a single drop drawn from the one Breath that is speaking the worlds, and it carries, faithfully, the same Name the cosmos is. The dhikr of <em>Hu</em> and the <em>nafas al-Rahman</em> are one motion seen at two scales, the breath of the servant and the Breath of the Real, and in the moment of remembrance the line between them thins to nothing.</p><div><hr></div><h2>Awareness in the breath</h2><p>If the breath is the thread on which all of existence is strung, then to lose awareness of the breath is to sleep through one’s own creation, and the orders built their disciplines to keep that thread in hand. The Naqshbandi masters made it the first rule of their path and gave it a Persian name, <em>hosh dar dam</em>, awareness in the breath. The instruction is exact and unsentimental. Let no single breath pass in heedlessness. On every inhalation and every exhalation the heart is to be present with God, so that the breathing the body performs thousands of times a day, and would otherwise spend in forgetfulness, becomes instead a continuous rope of remembrance, each breath a bead. The breath was already saying <em>Hu</em> before anyone taught it to. The work is only to be there while it says it.</p><p>Others heard in the syllable the root of sound itself. Hazrat Inayat Khan, a master of Indian music before he carried the path to the West, listened to <em>Hu</em> the way a musician listens to a room, and found it underneath everything audible.</p><h3>Hazrat Inayat Khan</h3><blockquote><p>The word Hu is the spirit of all sounds and of all words, and is hidden within them all, as the spirit is in the body.</p></blockquote><p><em>The Mysticism of Sound</em></p><p>For him <em>Hu</em> was the abstract sound, the tone that is never struck and so never stops, present in every other sound the way the spirit is present in a body that cannot point to where it sits. You do not hear it on its own, because you hear everything as it.</p><p>In the gathered remembrance this becomes audible for a moment. A hall of dervishes will hold the single syllable together in the dark, voice upon voice, until the sound seems to come loose from the throats producing it and stand on its own in the room, and the walls, as the masters describe it, seem to give way. And some carried the syllable into everything they made. The Punjabi master Sultan Bahu, who wrote his verses in the plain speech of farmers and field hands, ended every one of them, hundreds of verses, on the same final word, <em>Hu</em>. Whatever the couplet said, whatever grief or instruction or longing it held, it came to rest at the close on the breath that was already saying the Name. The poems do in ink what the breath does in the body. Each thought rises, turns, and settles back down onto <em>Hu</em>.</p><div><hr></div><h2>The cry that is the answer</h2><p>There is a danger in a God this hidden, that He should recede so far into the Unseen as to pass out of reach, a treasure so well buried that the love to be known fails at the last and leaves the seeker calling into a closed sky. The great poet of the path closed that danger with two images, and both of them are made of breath.</p><p>The first is a hollow reed. Rumi opens his vast poem not with a doctrine but with a sound, the complaint of a reed flute, which sings only because it has been cut from the reed bed and a breath now passes through its emptiness.</p><h3>Jalal al-Din Rumi</h3><blockquote><p>Listen to this reed as it tells its tale, complaining of separations. Since they cut me from the reed bed, my cry has made men and women moan. Whoever is left far from his source longs for the time he was one with it.</p></blockquote><p><em>Mathnawi, Book I</em></p><p>The reed is the human being, hollowed by separation from the source, and the music is not its own. The breath that cries through it comes from elsewhere. We sound because we are being breathed, and the longing in the sound is the longing of the cut thing for the bed it was cut from, which is to say the longing of the breath to return to the Breath.</p><p>The second image answers the first. Rumi tells of a man who called on God through a whole night, <em>Allah, Allah</em>, until a mocking voice asked him where the answer was, where was the <em>Here I am</em> that should come back to so much calling. The man fell silent, wounded, and slept, and in the green of a dream the guide of souls came to him.</p><h3>Jalal al-Din Rumi</h3><blockquote><p>Your every cry of ‘Allah’ is itself My ‘Here I am.’ Your longing and your pain and your burning are My messenger to you. Beneath every ‘O Lord’ that you cry, there wait many answers of ‘Here I am’ from Me.</p></blockquote><p><em>Mathnawi, Book III</em></p><p>The cry was the answer the whole time. There was never a gap for a reply to cross, because the breath that goes out as the Name and the breath that returns as the answer are one breath, the Breath of the Merciful moving out and turning back. The seeker who breathes <em>Hu</em> into the dark is not waiting at a shut door for it to open from the far side. He is the door, and the breath passing through him is the opening.</p><div><hr></div><h2>The breath you are taking now</h2><p>Set all of it down for a moment, the grammar and the spheres and the renewed creation, and come back to the plain fact the whole edifice was built to honor. You are breathing. You have been since before you had a name, and the sound the breath makes leaving you, when you stop arranging it and let it go, is the syllable the masters spent their lives unfolding. The pronoun of the Hidden, the Name of the Essence, the last letter of the Greatest Name, the Breath of the Merciful at the scale of one chest, all of it is carried in the small rush of air you can feel at your lips right now.</p><p>This is why the path could offer the dhikr of <em>Hu</em> to a beginner and to a saint and ask the same thing of both. There is nothing to acquire. The Name is not kept in a book you would have to find or a language you would have to learn. It is the most familiar sound your body makes, the one it has never once stopped making, the one it will make at the very end when it returns the last breath the way it received the first. The whole of the discipline is to be present while it happens, to catch up to what is already the case, to remember the One who is being said through you each time the air goes out.</p><p>So let the next breath go, slowly, and do not shape it. Listen to it leave. That sound is not yours, and it never was. It is the Hidden becoming faintly audible at the threshold of one body, the treasure spending a little of itself into the open, the He who is the First and the Last sounding His own Name in the only voice He has lent you for the span of a life. You are not calling to Him across a distance. You are the place where, for the length of a breath, He says Himself.</p><p><em>Hu.</em></p><p>James Fleming for Spiritual Relief</p><div><div><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/q1Ixz2PjyZw?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0" frameborder="0" width="728" height="409"></iframe></div></div><div><hr></div><p><em>Sources: the Qur’an; the hadith qudsi of the Hidden Treasure; Ibn Arabi, Istilahat al-Sufiyya and the doctrine of the nafas al-Rahman, huwiyya, and khalq jadid; Abd al-Karim al-Jili, al-Insan al-Kamil, on the He-ness and the sphere of Hahut; the traditional letter-reduction of the Greatest Name; the Naqshbandi principle of hosh dar dam; Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Sound; the abyat of Sultan Bahu; and Jalal al-Din Rumi, Mathnawi, Books I and III. Renderings from the Arabic and Persian are my own.</em></p>
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